Re: More frequent dinstall runs and mirror pushes

[Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca>]

Joerg Jaspert <joerg@ganneff.de> writes:

> [2] rsync needs a very long time to do the initial filesystem "check",
>     to find out what it actually needs to do. There is currently (afaik)
>     no way to improve that, as rsync simply offers no way to "preseed"
>     the needed information. 

I find that unison handles this situation very well.  At each end, it
keeps a record of the state of things when the last sync was done, so
it can tell what has changed at each end without any network traffic.
It is typically used for bidirectional synchronization, but can be told
to only do transfers in one direction.  It needs to be installed at both
ends.

I use it to synchronize a 3G directory tree with 42000 files over a DSL
line, and it takes 1.4s when there are no changes and things are in
cache.

Dan